Is Your MSP Helping to Plan for Your Growth?

Sure, we've been talking a lot about that Monday morning "oh no" moment that can derail your business operations for days, even weeks, without the right plan in place. But "oh no" moments can be larger challenges as well.

Say it's Monday morning and your boss calls you in to talk about that new office location opening in a few weeks. You realize there isn't a plan for the technology environment. Yes, the cabling is in, and the power lines are connected, but who is ordering the laptops, testing the WiFi, or making sure the internet works?

It's a common mistake to overlook the critical role strategic managed IT services plays for growing businesses – from hiring to new brick-and-mortar locations to migrating your workforce to a fully remote model. By the time your MSP knows what's going on, the impact on operations can be significant.

Key Takeaways

• A strategic managed IT services partner helps anticipate the technology requirements of hiring, expansion, new locations, and changing business operations before those needs become urgent.
• The most valuable IT roadmap connects business goals to technology priorities, estimated investments, implementation timing, ownership, and measurable results.
• Exigent's dedicated Technical Advisors and Periodic Business Reviews provide an operational advantage by keeping technology decisions aligned with business strategy as priorities, risks, and opportunities evolve.

Working with a business technology partner should be no different than any other line of business partner. Your lawyer, accountant, key vendors – they all are professionals charged with helping your business grow successfully by providing guidance and expertise. Your MSP should do the same. Too many companies look at their managed IT services provider for helpdesk support and the occasional procurement support. In reality, your MSP is a strategic partner tasked with using its experience to align today's powerful technology tools with your business goals.

How a Strategic Managed IT Services Partner Supports Business Growth

Let's start here: What does "strategic IT partner" actually mean? When your organization begins to evaluate business technology partners, you want to look for an MSP that can clearly articulate how they learn your business goals, the steps they take to understand technical, budget, and planning constraints, what steps they follow to identify dependencies and risks in your IT environment, and then how they recommend priorities and continue to revisit and revise your unique plan as a living part of your business strategy.

At Exigent, we tackle those challenges on multiple levels. We are a managed services-first IT partner that evaluates your IT environment as part of our detailed onboarding process to gain a foundational grasp on your systems. Then, we work long-term through our Strategic Account Management team to deepen our understanding, craft your IT roadmap, and leverage internal data to identify risks or potential issues lurking in your systems. We use information to set priorities, not our quarterly sales goals.

While smaller MSPs or individual IT consultants are often highly skilled, it can be difficult for those partners to access in-depth expertise across all the many segments of IT environments.

Strategic IT Partner vs. Helpdesk Provider: What's the Difference?

Let's be clear – small IT providers, even one-person companies, can provide reputable and reliable support. However, those small teams rarely have the bandwidth or depth of expertise to guide long-term strategic IT planning for business growth. And when and if a complex disruption hits, it can be difficult to manage the situation with limited resources.

When considering your strategic partnership choices, you should be asking several questions about capabilities, depth of resources, strategic plan for extensive disruptions, and more. Your business technology partner should have several essential questions for you to answer as well.

• Where is your business trying to grow or change?
• What is slowing your employees or clients down today?
• Which systems would struggle if headcount or locations changed?
• What client, insurance, contractual, or regulatory expectations are changing (short-term and long-term)?
• Which assets and applications will need replacement, renewal, or improvement as your business expands?

What should come out of that conversation? A straightforward document that captures the current state of your business and technology environment plus a clear overview of business goals, technology dependencies, priorities, timing, estimated investment/budget, ownership, and success measures.

What a Business Review Should Look Like

The Role of a Strategic IT Partner in Small Business Technology Planning

Getting on the same page in terms of immediate and tactical technology needs is only the first step when your organization is partnering with a mature MSP. Keeping your organization, your MSP, and your business needs and goals aligned is an ongoing process that requires stewardship. For busy, expanding small- to mid-sized businesses, that crucial role is an additional value provided by an MSP. At Exigent, a dedicated Technical Advisor works collaboratively with leadership to keep technical and business needs aligned, relying on communications and Periodic Business Reviews to fuel ongoing revisions, provide proactive IT management, and update the IT roadmap. A technical advisor brings technical and business context to the review, checks progress, and adjusts priorities. At Exigent, we offer layers of consultative advising, from the dedicated Technical Advisors who are provided as part of our Assurance Managed Services, to executive consultants who can bring an advanced, partner-level view to the discussion. For those businesses with initiatives requiring more extensive planning or a different level of engagement than the consulting bundled into Assurance, we offer paid virtual CIO services.

So the question is: If you launched a plan for a major business change tomorrow, would your provider know what to ask and what to do to keep your strategy moving forward with the right technology to enable success?

Download our guide to picking the right strategic business technology partner